Bridget Karlin on Intel’s Autonomous Driving Vision

Bridget Karlin, managing director of Intel’s Internet of Things Strategy, spelled out the future of autonomous driving and the company’s role in the business Friday during a Bloomberg West interview.

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In a conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Karlin said Intel is focused on technology that will transform the auto industry over the next five years. And she spoke of Intel’s goal of making the autonomous driving experience safe and consistent for all drivers.

“The entire industry is … understanding and committed to safety first,” she said.

In June, Intel announced a deal with BMW Group and Mobileye to bring fully autonomous production vehicles to market in 2021. As part of that push, the leaders of the three companies stated their goal of helping define open-standards platforms for all autonomous vehicles.

Karlin said Intel is uniquely positioned to be a major player in the automotive industry through its leadership in the Internet of Things business:

“IoT is enabling us to reinvent … the whole driving experience, and, frankly, the entire transportation concept. And, so we’re seeing that, when we think about entire fleets of vehicles rolling down our streets and not only driverless but with no literally no inside in the car, this is completely transformative.”

Auto research analyst Brian Sponheimer of Gabelli & Co. joined Karlin on Bloomberg West. He spoke of the difficulty of quickly bringing fully autonomous vehicles to the market. He estimated the cost of the technology at about $5,000 a vehicle, a price that may slow the adoption curve.

Karlin said Intel recognizes the challenges in transforming the industry. She laid out everything vehicles would need – all things Intel has a foothold in:

“You look at the components you need to have for autonomous driving. You need have in-vehicle computing that is robust and powerful. You need to have a 5G connection for connectivity, so that you have ultra-reliability and ultra-fast. You need to have a data center that is able to support tons and tons of data being analyzed and … supporting these machine-learning algorithms that are in the vehicle. And you need a human-machine interface that builds trust with the passenger in the vehicle. And then, finally, you need security. You need end-to-end security in the autonomous vehicle platform, not only securing the functions of the car, but also the trust and the privacy of the data that’s coming back and forth to the vehicle.”